With the more exciting GTA: San Andreas tasks out of the way, I've been weaning myself off of the Xbox and back onto what a old-fashioned format-snob might call "high art."

I saw The Interpreter with Sockless Pete and another Lawrentian yesterday night; that was a surprisingly good movie. Especially for language geeks. Tonight's feature, a downloaded copy of Elektra, was not as impressive.

It makes sense that I should read, after all, since I still have all this free time. If all goes according to plan I'll have almost a month in Chicago before school starts, so this is practice, time to cultivate good habits. Though here's hoping I'll be able to find a job there... I feel foolish enough lazing about in Appleton when I could have stayed home and worked at Giovanni's Pizza for the umpteenth "last time."

On Ben's suggestion I read Dan Simmons' Hyperion and its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion. They're both exciting reads, but the first is cleverly structured in a manner reminiscent of the "Canterbury Tales" (the author tips his hand a little too much at one point and makes the parallel obvious, but I guess he wanted to make sure people got it) and it was done so well that the second book was bound to feel like a disappointment.

There's a creature in there called "the Shrike," and one of the next books I read was Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which isn't good, so don't read it. (The Day of the Locust, by the way, isn't that great either, which is a shame because one of the main characters in that book is a dullard named Homer Simpson.) Despite it's thunderous mediocrity, however, Miss Lonelyhearts by some amazing coincidence also has a character named Shrike. That blew my mind, but apparently the Shrike is a kind of bird, and the name fits in both cases.

So my rambling point is that not only am I reading, I'm reading with this massive dictionary on hand. Under my knees, to be exact. I tried opening it up in my lap and reading the smaller book inside it, so to speak, but the background words... it was like trying to carry on a conversation on a crowded bus.

Right now I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which I got from Ann of Stillwater as part of our foredoomed attempt at a book club. I bought her Joseph Heller's God Knows because I was interested in reading about something he wrote besides Catch-22, but I don't think either of us ever finished our first assignment.

There are a lot of reasons I could never get past the first twenty or so pages. The first was probably the fact that this is known as Waugh's "God's Grace" novel and I didn't need a 350-page book on how great antevaticantwovian Catholicism was. And I didn't know Waugh; I've read three of his satires since then. Also, the books starts slow.

I'm only a third of the way through, but it's satisfying to see Waugh working with more developed characters. The writing is easily some of his best.

The biggest stumbling block for me right now is that there are so many major characters of, let's say, questionable sexuality, including and especially the narrator. Maybe that's what John Hutchens of the New York Times was referring to in the back-cover blurb: "by indirection it summarizes and comments upon a time and a society."

I don't know what to make of my reading, I could be contaminating the text with a 21st-century viewpoint. In some modernist works homosexuality is just a signal for decadence, like Venice or attendant gossip columnists. This is an old book, written in Britain in the 1940s, and I don't know anything about British cultural norms during that period.

Though my guess would be that straight guys then, as now, were not constantly holding hands with each other. Like a certain protagonist and his good friend. (Cough).

One of the other characters certainly thinks the pair is gay, and the typically magnificent Back Bay Books edition cover, with one guy just perhaps touching another guy's leg with his foot (or perhaps not, there's no perspective) only adds to the mystery.

I'm just worried that this is just the 1940s version of a "mancrush" — a rather uncouth Lawrence term for a non-sexual infatuation with a male friend — and I'm missing the point entirely. Another character in the book chose this interpretation.

At this point I'm going to trust my knowledge of Waugh and my B.A. degree in English and say that there's definitely an undercurrent of something. I'm just surprised to find it in this book, with these characters, of all places. We'll see what else he does with it; even if it's there it could still be largely symbolic.

Excited to be reading again. I've got a whole list for my next visit to the library.